Form Designer

The Form Designer is the main DBACentral for MySQL tool for creating and modifying data forms. To design a new form double-click the Create form in design view item within the Profile Window | Forms page. To design the existing form select its name within the Profile Window | Forms page and click the Design button on the toolbar or in the popup menu.

The main area of the Form Designer is a container for the form controls. You can place new controls on this area, as well as move, resize, or delete the existing controls.

You can put a new control to the form in two ways. The first is to select a control type on the Form Designer toolbar and then click on the area point where you want to place the control. Then to define the control data source and other properties, right-click on the control and select the Properties item from the popup menu. Other way is to use the Form Tree View floating window and drag the fields onto the form for creating controls bound to the selected field. After the control is created, you can edit it properties within the Form Inspector floating window.

To change the position of the control, simply select it and drag to the new place. To resize the control capture one of the points on the control bounds and drag until control gets to the required size. You can place controls into other Group Box controls as well. In this case moving the group box control will move all the included controls and the coordinates of the included controls in the Form Inspector will be given relatively to the parent control. To select multiple controls, simply move the cursor with the left mouse button pressed around the over controls or select controls one by one with the Shift key pressed.

The popup menu of the Form Designer allows you to cut, copy, paste, and delete the form controls and provides the following additional functions:

Align - this function can be used for aligning several controls relatively to each other vertically or horizontally;
Align to Grid - this function aligns the selected control(s) in such a way, that the upper left corner of each control lies on the nearest grid point;
Size - allows you to adjust the control size in the quickest way;
Tab Order - this function allows you to edit the tabulation order (order of changing focus by the TAB key) of the form;
Convert To - this function allows you to change the type of the selected control with preserving all other control properties;
Properties - this item allows you to edit the form and control properties within the Form Inspector window.
Tree View - this item allows you to view the control hierarchy and select fields to add to the form within the Form Tree View window.

The Form Designer tool pallette provides a variety of controls to put onto the form. Below are the descriptions of the controls.

Label - a simple control to display optional text;
Button - a simple button, which allows you to set an action to perform on user click (open another form, close current form, etc.);
Group Box - a control that can encapsulate as many other controls, as required, in a group;
DB Label - a control to display text from the table column or SQL query without editing;
Text Edit - this control allows displaying and editing the table column or SQL query text;
Spin Edit - this control is better used for integer values, it provides buttons for quick increasing and decreasing the contained value;
Combo Box - a drop-down list; better to use for displaying columns of ENUM type;
Memo - this control can display large multi-line texts; better to use with TEXT fields;
Radio Group - a set of radio buttons for displaying ENUM columns;
Lookup Combo Box - this control displays a set of values, taken from some other table field; better to use it with columns, which are parts of relationships;
Date Edit - displays dates and provides calendar-like editor for updating date values;
Time Edit - displays and modifies time values;
Blob Edit - a popup editor, which can display either images and texts, depending on the content;
Popup Edit - a popup editor, which allows editing columns of SET type;
Image - a control for displaying BLOB fields, which contain BMP, JPEG, GIF, or PNG images;
Grid - this control allows you to insert master-detail sub-grids into your form.

All changes made to the form design takes effect only after the Apply button is pressed. If you want to discard all changes and revert to the last saved form design, click Revert.